Communication systems are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as voice, packet data, and so on. These systems may be time, frequency, and/or code division multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users simultaneously by sharing the available system resources. Examples of such multiple-access systems include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems, Multiple-Carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA), Wideband CDMA (W-CDMA), High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) systems, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) systems, and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) systems.
Networks are vulnerable to attacks and eavesdropping on ports open for active channels. As used herein, “port” refers to a number field in a network protocol that is used for de-multiplexing at a particular layer. Examples of ports include the user datagram protocol (UDP) port field, the transmission control protocol (TCP) port field and Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) port field. In particular, since these ports are “open,” packets arriving on them are accepted, at least initially, even if they are not actually part of an authorized media stream.
A communication system may employ a hopping scheme to improve interference and security. Port hopping is a technique where network data is sent and received via dynamically changing ports in a defense mainly against eavesdropping and denial of service (DoS) attacks. Existing techniques for providing port hopping have been proposed. However, existing techniques adhere to a given protocol. Furthermore, these protocols and algorithms are cumbersome and sometimes not feasible to implement because most modern applications predominantly rely on a set of third party tools and external systems. The underlying code implementation, especially for the host system, would involve modifications which are not feasible, and may be impossible, i.e., it would entail complete control over the systems.